Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

My proposal is to walk along the routes marked out around a village situated on a verge of an open-pit lignite mine in Poland. The practice facilitates an etnographic insight into complex environmental entanglements of extractivism - a landscape shaped by silencing and weed infestation.

Paper long abstract:

My proposal situates itself between methodological intervention into etnographic research on extractivist landscapes and decolonial perspectives on knowledge production, especially the ethical postulate so as the research avoids following the resource extraction modes in relation to information obtained during a fieldwork. The case study I refer to is a tiny village of Opolno-Zdrój which sits on the edge of Turów, an opencast lignite mine and a power station, and also on the Polish-Czech-German border. Its predicaments reflect in cross-border terms the typical discrepancies and controversies associated with lignite mining. Historically - a German sanatorium, Bad Oppelsdorf, after incorporation into Polish People’s Republic in 1945 it was subject to a planned economy scheme where land was transformed into mine property and its population grew of incentivized resettlement of workforce, mainly from the territories incorporated into Soviet Union. Today the mine continues to operate in spite of several lawsuits, just transitions schemes which are not taken into account by its owners and a growing criticism of coal-fired power generation. 70 years on Opolno-Zdrój keeps its temporalities in a precarious gap between existence and non-existence. Practices of walking I could observe and become part of make us think across the political and discursive divide created by the opposing stance: the mine continuing until 2044 or not any more. I will try to show how the environmental entanglements of village’s „non-existence” are vital contributors to the stories not told.